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Friday, April 27, 2012

#322: Srinivasan Pillay

The intolerably silly fluffmeister Pillay is in many ways
Deepak Chopra’s even more severely critical thinking-challenged herald. Pillay
is a self-billed certified master coach, psychiatrist, brain imaging researcher
and speaker, and likes to demonstrate a profound inability to spot fallacies or
evaluate science. He has
actually citedDean Radin's “research” as “evidence” for “distant healing”.

Although he likes to emphasize that many of his friends are
rational and intelligent (though he wouldn’t be able to recognize rationality if his life depended on
it) he himself displays a profound hatred for rational thought, science,
evidence and, indeed, anything short of complete, unqualified gullibility. He
is most famous for one of the most idiotic over-the-top appeals to nature
arguments ever made, in his essay (Huffpo – where else) “Why rational thinking
is not all it’s cracked up to be”, where he observes that people often don’t
use rationality (but rather emotions) in their decision-making and, instead of
concluding that people should perhaps be a little more careful, he concludes
that since rationality isn’t rational, we should stop valuing it so dearly.
Therefore science doesn’t work. Therefore quantum woo and Cartesian dualism. It
is discussed here
(it is excellent fodder for an Intro to Critical Thinking class). He has also
promoted The Secret. Yes, that “The Secret”.

Pillay has some PubMed-registered publications that also
display the same lack of rigor, methodological understanding or, heck,
understanding of what evidence is and what it may show.

Diagnosis: Helplessly moronic crackpot. People hardly come
more densely deluded than this, and Pillay’s spectacular failure to understand
evidence or critical thinking impresses even those of us who’ve had to deal
with Larry Dossey or Deepak Chopra. Still, it looks as if some people actually
listen to him.